Category: Present

The thesis of the article Handwriting is History by Anne Trubek seems so obvious, but yet it’s something that I’d never considered before, despite that 99.9% of the writing I do is on my computer. Growing up and moving through the education system, a huge emphasis was always placed

on the ability to write by hand – not just spelling, grammar and general proficiency in language, but actually the ability to draw those characters out by hand as a way of making meaning.

On a recent airport layover, I set out to write a bunch of letters and postcards for people back home. It was painful: my hand, fingers and wrist ached and my penmanship was atrocious. Worst of all, I found myself frustratingly incapable of making the words appear on the paper quickly enough to avoid many of them getting lost somewhere between my brain and the ink as it settled on the paper. I found writing by hand to be wildly inefficient.

Despite this experience, as I read Handwriting is History, I still found it difficult to accept the idea that we may live in a world where writing things out by hand is no longer necessary. What about lovely handwritten notes? What about handwriting as an art form? What about the personality of our handwriting? Surely all those concepts cannot be supplanted by choosing a font in our word processing software? Trubek has alarmingly good answers for most if not all of these questions, mainly rooted in the reality that handwriting is not and has never been about individuality: “when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the “right” way to form letters.”

Trubek also has solid grounds to conclude that even today we still politicize handwriting and attribute characteristics like intelligence to someone who has a ‘good hand’. She cites a study done at Vanderbilt University called The Handwriting Effect, which found that “teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literacy merit of text based on its overall legibility … when teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship.”

The conclusion of the article is that at its core, writing is about communicating ideas. Doing whatever we can to create a wide space through which our thoughts can flow unencumbered, or as unencumbered as possible, should be our primary concern when choosing a tool. Why then, do we continue to put so much focus on teaching proper handwriting techniques to children in schools when it is quite likely that lovely penmanship is something they will never need?

In addition to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the heartbreaking story of Henrietta Lacks, the US has recently admitted to and apologized for experimentation they did on prisoners, mental patients and soliders in Guatemala in the 1940s. In addition to using tax dollars to pay infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, officials also did things such as pour “the bacteria onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.” (source) This activity happened

at the same time the US was involved in prosecuting Nazis for committing similar crimes in concentration camps across Europe.

The ‘purpose’ of the study was to look at the effects of penicillin on the disease but although the infected were treated with the drug “whether everyone was cured is not clear”. Perhaps it is no surprise that Doctor John Cutler was behind this study and was also the driving force between the reprehensible Tuskegee Study, which he defended throughout his life.

This continues the seemingly endless dark history of the practice of medical experimentation on human beings, without their consent.

From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected … children [with disabilities] with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors. (source)

In addition to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the heartbreaking story of Henrietta Lacks, the US has recently admitted to and apologized for experimentation they did on prisoners, mental patients and soliders in Guatemala in the 1940s. In addition to using tax dollars to pay infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, officials also did things such as pour “the bacteria onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.” (source) This activity happened at the same time the US was involved in prosecuting Nazis for committing similar crimes in concentration camps across Europe.
The ‘purpose’ of the study was to look at the effects of penicillin on the disease but although the infected were treated with the drug “whether everyone was cured is not clear”. Perhaps it is no surprise that Doctor John Cutler was behind this study and was also the driving force between the reprehensible Tuskegee Study, which he defended throughout his life.
This continues the seemingly endless dark history of the practice of medical experimentation on human beings, without their consent.
From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected … children [with disabilities] with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors. (source)
Further Reading:
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Another Look at Unethical Medicine
Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America
Image Credit: Syphilitic Diseases by Taberandrew
Path:

So far so typical – apart from the fact that there is no CD here or any recording media. The music is generated live from a microchip inside the case and output from a headphone socket also housed on the case.

So 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording as such, best place to check credit score but it is a physical artefact which allows you to experience the production of the music live, just for you. I use the word “orchestra” loosely but hey, this is art.

A microchip mini-orchestra is never going to become the dominant way of distributing music. But, just as quality photography prompted Picasso and other nonrepresentational artists to search for new and exciting areas in visual art, we could see this a creative reaction in physically-distributed music to the dominance of digital files. Fortunately many would concur that the actual music here is very good too.

I recently spent six weeks in Mexico in a small village bordered on one edge by the sea and on the other by a large fresh water mangrove estuary. The natural state of things was intensified by the rainy season, this meant a lot of bugs. The beautiful sea shore was a mine field of sand flies while everywhere else was swarming with bat-size mosquitoes. After six weeks, my skin was a mess of red welts and the scabby remains of bites I’d over scratched.

En route to Canada I spent a few days in Puerto Vallarta in a relatively nice, well-sealed air conditioned hotel. On my second morning there, I woke up with about ten red itchy welts along the outside of one of my legs. Irritated, I shared this information on Facebook and my aunt, who has spent a lot of time traveling in North Africa, informed me that it might be bed bugs and that if we had them, we would surely carry them in our clothing and luggage along with us wherever we went. Immediately, I became obsessed – examining sheets, duvet covers, in between mattresses and within the smaller folds of my clothing and suitcase. Apart from being disgusting, one of the most difficult things about bedbugs is that they are nocturnal, very small and good at hiding; so it’s not easy to determine if you have them.

After that morning, apart from the odd set of bites I could trace to time outside, I didn’t seem to get any additional welts and my bed mate remained mostly bite free; in the absence of a bed bug sniffing dog, I’ve decided that we did not have bed bugs; but not before spending hours on Google reading about them and looking at horrible pictures.

The most interesting thing that I read about the pests is the phenomenon of ‘Post Bed Bug Stress Disorder’, which I can very much relate to though I don’t think mine is a serious case:

Many formerly rational people are waking up in the middle of the night inspecting themselves or their children for bed bug bites. They often feel phantom bed bugs crawling on their bodies while lying in bed. Perhaps the most worrisome are those individuals who are sleeping in ounces of DEET, spearmint oil or other less-friendly concoctions in the hope that bed bugs — real or imagined — will be thwarted from biting them …

These people are suffering from what I like to call PBBSD — Post Bed Bug Stress Disorder — an illness characterized

by irritability, sleeplessness, anxiety and bed bug hallucinations. Yes, these people also suffer from the physical effects of bed bug bites, but the bites go away. (source)

In 2008 a former Fox News employee successfully sued the maintenance company at NewsCorp headquarters for post traumatic stress syndrome brought on by a bed bug infestation in the building.

“My client is so acutely injured that she can’t take the subway and she is being seen by a doctor three times a week,” said Mr. Schnurman [the plaintiff’s lawyer], who has handled “hundreds” of bedbug cases, most of which have been settled out of court. “She would literally take off all her clothes at the door and put on house clothes before she would even touch her baby. (source)

I like discovering linguistic terms for things that I thought were too trivial to be given an official name.

Eggcorns

An Eggcorn is a special case of a malapropism: a mistaken phrase that retains some of the original meaning. For example, where a malapropism might be the nonsensical, “He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness“, an eggcorn might be, “Chickens coming home to roast“.

A Mondegreen is a mis-construal of a phrase in a song, poem or lyric. The most famous of these is the Jimi Hendrix line, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky“, which is often misheard as, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy“. However, some argue that this particular example is not really a mishearing, as Jimi may have purposefully sung the line to be interpreted both ways.

The Kiss This Guy database has an excellent collection of mondegreens, including the awesome, “Might as well face it, you’re a d**k with a glove” – Addicted to Love, by Robert Palmer.

The term derives from a misheard line in a poem, that was originally, “And laid him on the green“.

(Thanks to Francesco Cetraro for pointing me to the video above, which has some wonderful mondegreens, including “Steven Seagal”, which is always funny, in any context.)

Charactonyms / Aptronyms

An Aptronym is a person’s name that suits them, such as the American football player Chuck Long. Similarly, a